InnoEngine is an innovation process strategy firm that helps organizations across sectors unlock new value, often by doing something they’ve never done before, or through a model they haven’t used before.

Our team believes that innovation is a repeatable model. It may be shepherding Fortune 100 companies through ambitious projects. It may be supporting pre-revenue startups go into market. It may be helping multi-stakeholder initiatives form and sustain. 

Whatever the client and sector, InnoEngine’s models help teams get going, projects get unstuck, and communities and organizations operating like efficient, effective engines of innovation.

InnoEngine leverages our shared expertise, and our model for the Six Gears of the Innovation Engine, to support evolution and solutions for communities and organizations—and to help initiatives find traction when they are idling. 

We are committed to solving practical problems with practical innovation, through net new solutions and multi-stakeholder partnerships. And we believe that a fixed mindset fixes nothing new, while an innovation mindset makes room for imagination. An innovation mindset not only looks at what is but is willing to ask what *could* be.

Founding partners Sam Ford, Amanda Havard, and Vijay Kamineni and their team of InnoEngineers bring vast experience leading innovation initiatives across a broad range of sectors--manufacturing, healthcare, media & entertainment, government, higher education, technology, retail, and more. InnoEngine partners with the organizations and communities they support, from idea to impact. And we iterate on those impactful projects by helping our partners create Repeatable Patterns and Models (RPM).

InnoEngine itself was taken from idea to impact in an old mall that has been adaptively reused as infrastructure for an innovation ecosystem: the Western Kentucky University Innovation Campus, just north of Nashville, Tennessee, in Kentucky’s fastest growing city–Bowling Green, KY. 

Founding partners Sam Ford and Vijay Kamineni first met through work on strengthening the innovation ecosystem for Kentucky. Building on a series of innovation pilot projects across Western and Eastern Kentucky–with collaborators throughout the state and at research institutions like MIT and University of Southern California–the two were instrumental in Kentucky becoming the first mainland U.S. region to successfully complete the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (MIT REAP) in 2020. In 2021, the duo helped launch the nonprofit AccelerateKY, which has acted as a catalyst for various innovation ecosystem projects over the past few years. In 2022, based on an AccelerateKY whitepaper, they launched the nonprofit Metals Innovation Initiative, focusing what they’d learned on building an innovation ecosystem on one of Kentucky’s comparative advantage industries, the metals sector.

And, in 2023, after paying several visits and experiencing the rising innovation ecosystem forming in Bowling Green, founding partner Amanda Havard–a longtime collaborator and former client of Ford’s–moved to Bowling Green to establish her next set of companies.

In various combinations, the trio began working together on various innovation ecosystem projects in the region and–in 2024–established Innovation Engine to formalize the emerging processes that the founding team uncovered as they combined their knowledge and approaches of leading innovation initiatives across a diverse range of clients.